Using archival and interview material, this paper examines the long history of retail workers’ contestations over trading times in South African shops from the 1940s to the present day. Trading hours marked retail workers’ working hours, but were regulated by the Shops and Offices Act and by municipal or provincial legislation. Throughout the 20th century and continuing today, retailers pressed to expand trading times, as a service to the consuming public. The casualisation of labour in the sector in the transition to democracy was directly connected to the extension of trading times and to how unions bargained around the standard shift. This paper considers several key moments of worker and union contestation around trading hours and how these battles were fought, first, through the discourse of motherhood, when white women worked these jobs, and second, to protect the standard shift, itself as a measure of respectability, when black women moved into these jobs. Efforts to limit trading hours as a mechanism to regulate working hours won in certain moments with longer term effects for this gendered workforce, and offer a site of the conjuncture of law and politics to explore how workers, consumers, politicians, city officials, and trade unions formulated demands concretely linking the publics of city streets and stores with gendered and racialised expectations of service and providing. As trading hours expanded in the 2000s, however, it remains working class black women who serve in longer shifts in mostly precarious jobs, with implications for families and as well as for personal safety. Thus, ultimately, the paper considers multiple dimensions: political contestation over core working conditions in the sector, the relationship of working time to families and gendered identities, the relationship between labour and consumption (and workers and consumers) as the economy changed, and the law as practice and process, defining such everyday social worlds as shopping.